Halloween Fright: Five Versions Of That Terrifying Toccata And Fugue

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Organ music: inherently spooky? This one is in St. James' Cathedral of Townsville, Australia, ca. 1902.

State Library of Queensland, Australia/via Flickr

Organ music: inherently spooky? This one is in St. James' Cathedral of Townsville, Australia, ca. 1902.

State Library of Queensland, Australia/via Flickr

Many folks would call Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor the ultimate piece of scary music, thanks to any number of horror movies and pop culture moments that have used its thundering organ sounds as a kind of ghoulish shorthand. (But not always. Remember how it was used in Fantasia? The visuals were marvelous, though it wasn't quite as scary as, say, the Night on Bald Mountain segment — unless you count the conductor-as-deity narrative as inherently frightening.)

So with All Hallows' Eve later this week, we thought it would be a perfect time to look up some tricks and treats among the endless Bach arrangements on YouTube. We'll leave it to you to figure out which are the aural equivalent of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and which are the Mary Janes.